Vendor Mgmt
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Infographics Suck
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I was riding my bike around Marin (north of San Francisco) this fall, it was a bit cloudy, grey and not as bright as usual. Just the week before, I had purchased a new pair of lenses for my sunglasses, just for this occasion, and I was absolutely stunned at the difference it made to…
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All Posts, Engagement, Governance, HR Service Delivery, HR Strategy, HR Technology, Vendor Mgmt, VendorsCedar Crestone HR Technology Survey: Create a Winning HR Function
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All too often, I get an industry report to read and end up saying to my colleagues, “wow this is crap.” Case in point, at the end of 2012, I got a widely read industry report that rated a halfway decent HCM provider’s payroll engine to be better than one of the major payroll outsourcers. …
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Enterprise Solutions, HR Technology, Innovation, Point Solutions, Portal, Service Delivery, Vendor Mgmt, Web 2.0The Technology Does Not Sell
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Years ago, there is a motorola executive was speaking to a group of students. He asks the students to answer a couple of simple questions, “who among you owns a motorola cell phone?”. A small group of students raise their hands. He continues to as them, “who among you own a Nokia cell phone?”. The…
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Evaluating the Demo
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I’ll admit that a while back (wow – are we going on 10 years now?) I was an SC. You know – those guys from the vendors that the salespeople count on to demonstrate product during the sales cycle. SC’s are a highly valued commodity. They are highly trained product experts that must float between…
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Differentiation in SaaS
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A while back, I was an SC for a large vendor organization. It was a lot of fun highlighting the great stuff in my applications (actually – those were the fun parts). But our jobs were to help find solutions as well as workarounds to things that could simply not be done. Given this is…
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Taleo versus SuccessFactors
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At the end of 2009, Bersin did a great analysis of the two organizations that I can’t really beat. It’s a nice objective and score by score view of the vendors that is based in good factual data, and I’m going to take a different approach, but you should read Bersin’s post first. From my…
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Consulting Models
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I was actually asked by a client recently to increase the scope of my project – or at least the staffing model we were using. There are a more than a few consulting models, but I think it generally boils down to a couple of easy examples. There are differences in philosophy I suppose, and…
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The Vendor Demo Test Drive
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I must say that Jim Holincheck wrote a quite persuasive piece a couple months ago on why vendor scripted demos will go away. In today’s environment of SaaS applications, it’s so much easier for organizations to set up sandboxes for potential customers to play around in rather than the old model where client server applications…
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UFO’s: Unfinished Objects
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I’m not sure who first coined the term “shelfware.” Most of our IT departments have all sorts of stuff we have purchased that we intend to implement but just haven’t done so yet. Or we have implementations that we have abandoned, or we have technology and strategy roadmaps that are mid way through because we…
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Agility Methods and Project Governance
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Governance and scope creep is always one of the major problems in any project. Limited resources and continuous demand from non-project needs both elongate projects and spread resources too thin. I was speaking with a technology friend about project governance methods and he pointed out that his organization used a strict “agility method” that I…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Dysfunction
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The only consistent feature in all of your dissatisfying relationships is you. ((Despair.com)) I often see organizations who have many vendor relationships that are either marginally successful or complete failures. What these organizations never enjoy hearing is that they are partly to blame for these failed relationships. While I’ll always admit that failure is an…
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The Struggles of Vendor Integration
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Oracle owns PeopleSoft, Sieble, and countless others. Kenexa takes Brassring and Webhire. ADP acquires someone every year or two. There are some obvious things these vendors need to do to integrate the acquired companies. Bill Kutik of HREonline has a great “Cynic’s Six Steps to Application Integration.” Press Release Integration Collateral Integration Portal Integration User…
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Where are the HRO Successes?
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Because much of my practice focuses on helping companies and HRO providers improve the outsourcing relationship for cost, quality and service levels, in my job I see many broken HRO relationships. It’s the nature of the business. So it comes as no surprise to see the article published online at Workforce.com yesterday: ACS, Delta Change…
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HRO – Success and Partnership
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The success rate of HRO contracts is bad to dismal. That isn’t to say that companies are not saving money, or that vendors are providing bad service levels. But often, companies are dissatisfied with their overall relationships. The key indicator for satisfaction is not service delivery or cost savings (although those are drivers). The key…
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Hewitt’s Lessons Learned
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From time to time companies exhibit moments of organizational maturity not often enough seen in the market. This week’s moment comes to us courtesy of Hewitt Associates’ Mike Wright, global HRO sales co-leader, during his presentation last month at the Conference Board’s 2006 Human Resource Outsourcing Conference in Chicago. Thank you (again) to Jessica Marquez…
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100% Claims Audits Revisited
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Nearly one year ago, Double Dubs graciously asked me to be a regular contributor on this most amazing blog of his. I think all of us can agree that what he has built here is impressive. He has created a reference tool for HR professionals (both in and out of the technology space) to come…
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A Technological Approach to Claims Audit
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The last two weeks I wrote about the ineffectiveness of traditional claims audit and the inherent conflict of interest some companies face when they perform such audits. This week I’d like to introduce a company that brings a different approach to the industry: HR Best Practices. HR Best Practices was founded by Howard Gerver five…
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Independent Consulting: Perception or Reality?
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Last week, Barbara Martinez wrote a very in-depth article which appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (September 18, 2006; Page A1). A subscription to WSJOnline is necessary to view the article, but I encourage you to read it if at all possible. In the article Ms. Martinez writes about independence in…
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Relationship Management – Measuring Satisfaction
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How do you know when an outsourcing initiative has been successful? At what point can you sit back, look at all that has been done and actually congratulate yourselves on a successful implementation, transition and effective and stable ongoing processing environment. I think back to the system person I dealt with on a 401(k) conversion…
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How Much Can Outsourcing Really Save?
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I set this article aside some time ago with the intention of commenting on it at some point. Now is as good a time as any. The story, “Survey: Outsourcing saves less than claimed” is based on a survey conducted by TPI. The gist of the story is summed up in the lead: “Outsourcing of…